Pierrot le Fou (1965)

Member Picks showcases the movies that inspired the Moxie’s biggest supporters.

Every month, one member picks a film that impacted their lives and we put it up on the big screen.
March’s pick was made by moxie members Chris Drew and Jahnavi Delmonico.

Synopsis: Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema. (Criterion)

"Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful 'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S."

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"Godard has in this way set in motion what has been succinctly summed up as an "an existential Bonnie and Clyde," a freewheeling lovers-on-the-lam adventure that is light and lyrical but also dark and contemplative."

- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

"Many achievements in one, it’s a rebel road movie, radical manifesto, but above all a film about being driven mad by love. Godard’s two most iconic stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, play the adulterous couple who turn their back on bourgeois Parisian society and hit the road, heading ever southward."

- Tim Robey, The Telegraph

" It’s a wild-eyed, everything-in-the-pot cross-processing of artistic, cinematic, political and personal concerns, where the story stutters, splinters and infuriates its way to an explosive finale. Taken as a whole, we’re right back to that word again: emotions."

- Staff, Time Out

"Working from the outline provided by Lionel White's novel Obsession, Godard was able to proceed without a script and create what he called "a completely spontaneous film." Spontaneous or not, PIERROT LE FOU is arguably one of the few Godard pictures to have the desired balance of romance, adventure, violence, and humor on one side, and philosophy, literary and cinematic allusion, and Brechtian distancing on the other."